“There, now, that wasn’t so good, was it?” — Leonard Pinth-Garnell

I’m rarely persuaded that something bad, especially a movie, is so bad that it’s good. Usually bad is bad. I’m not going to waste much time watching bad romantic or other comedies, bad drama, bad action flicks, bad horror, bad adaptations of comic books, bad SF, bad war movies, and so forth. I have soft spots for some of the bad movies I saw as a child — The Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy, The Killer Shrews, Frogs, Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster, and a few others — but even so I don’t really want to see them again.

Reading about bad movies is another matter. The Book of Lists, mentioned earlier this week, introduced me to a number of titles universally acknowledged as bad, the only ones of which I’d be temped to watch — a few minutes of anyway — would be The Conqueror, just to see the ridiculousness of John Wayne pretending to be Genghis Khan, or Che! to see Omar Sharif as Che and Jack Palance as Castro. Other titles on its list included The Horror of the Beach Party, Lost Horizon (1973), Robot Monster, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, and That Hagen Girl.

It’s a little hard to remember that before the Internet, lists like that, while not rare, weren’t everywhere you looked. They were still something of a novelty. On the remainder table at Harrods’ book department in 1988, I happened across a fuller example of a bad-movie list in the form of The World’s Worst Movies by Tim Healy (1986). For all of £1.99, it was a deal.

It’s more than a series of lists. Instead, the chapters are thematic essays — entertaining, not very serious essays — mocking bad monster movies, bad SF, bad action pictures, “sex schlockers” and “teenbombs,” along with subchapters along the lines of the Worst of Joan Collins, the Worst of Ronald Reagan, the Worst of Elvis, and the Worst of Roger Corman. Many familiar titles are discussed: Plan 9 From Outer Space, They Saved Hitler’s Brain, The Swarm, Glen or Glenda? etc, etc.

The book also introduced me to movies I’d never heard of, such as Night of the Lepus (1972), which is “a horror film about a horde of monster rabbits which roams the Arizona ranchlands in carnivorous packs leaving trails of destruction of their wake.” Or Zombies of the Stratosphere, a 1952 serial featuring a young Leonard Nimoy as a Martian. Or Percy (1971), about which the book asks, “What could be worse than a film about a penis transplant?” The answer: “Another film about a penis transplant,” referring to the sequel, Percy’s Progress (1974).

I will say that I went out of my way to watch Plan 9 From Outer Space on tape after I saw the entertaining movie Ed Wood. It was as bad as promised. Yuriko watched about 10 minutes and then left the room. I stuck with it and noticed that while Ed Wood tried to re-create some of the bad performances of that movie, they didn’t always work. Most notably, Bill Murray as Bunny Breckinridge, who was the “The Ruler” in Plan 9. Bill Murray is simply too good an actor to be that bad.